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Category Archives: My Imaginary Friend is Better Than Yours

The line between “what you do” and magic is super thin. That line, I would argue, in the South is just what people at church wouldn’t give a second glance to.

If you look right at that boy’s neck, you’ll see he’s wearing an amber teething necklace. Not to chew on. It serves no practical purpose. I tried not to make too big a deal about learning of it, because I want magic in life and I didn’t want to make anyone feel weird. But I was delighted.

This is apparently perfect dog weather. Sonnyboy bounded around the yard, played in the creek, sniffed secret sniffs, chased a shadow, came when he was called, and leaped twice over a giant log. Now he’s napping like a champ.

I’ve been doing my October thing. I was worried with the medication that I wouldn’t be able to. I mean, I feel like this year has been a slow rewiring of my brain in ways I’m not sure about yet. I don’t know how my creativity’s going to play out.

So, it’s going, but it’s going differently. It feels more abstract. The lessons are harder to put into words. It’s just different.

I meant to talk about this yesterday, but I was so aggravated by that stupid pattern, which continues to be not much better. Like everyone else in the world, I read Hans Fiene’s article over at The Federalist about how men and women can’t be friends.

Apparently he claims he was only about 40% serious, but which 40%, you know? The part where men and women can’t be friends, I assume.

I looked him up. He’s a Missouri Synod Lutheran Minister whose church is about thirty minutes from one of the towns I grew up in. That’s pretty far north for a Missouri Synod Lutheran. If you aren’t up on the intricacies of differences between denominations, just picture in your head the cool female Lutheran minister you know. Missouri Synod is not that kind of Lutheran.

But there are some other things on his church website that I’m not sure enough about the Missouri Synod to know if it’s in line with their theological thinking or if this is just his own brand–when I read his church’s website, it seems to me that they believe in transubstantiation–that the communion bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. But Lutherans, at least none I’m familiar with (and I’m like 65% certain this was Luther’s position himself), don’t believe this. They believe a slightly different kind of mystery where the bread and wine are both still bread and wine AND the body and blood of Christ.

As someone who’s ethnically Methodist, both things seem odd to me since we go more for the metaphor–this bread and grape juice symbolize the body and blood of Christ.

And, on the one hand, this is a minor detail. On the other hand, Lutherans and Catholics have been arguing about this since, well, since Lutheranism began, pretty much. It’s one of the key disagreements.

Another thing I’m also less certain of is his church’s policy on who can take communion. Most Methodist churches and my dad explicitly have an open table, meaning it doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe. If you’re there, you can take communion. You don’t have to, of course, but you can.

Now, I have taken communion at a Missouri Synod Lutheran church before and I certainly don’t believe many, many things about their doctrine, but no one stopped me or told me I couldn’t.

On the other hand, I accidentally took communion at a Catholic mass once when I was young, from a priest who absolutely knew who I was, because I didn’t know non-Catholics weren’t supposed to take communion at a Catholic church. And I’ve always been grateful that he didn’t embarrass me by stopping me.

So, you can’t take communion at Fiene’s church unless he okays it by assuring that you’re doctrinally aligned with the congregation. And again, I’m not sure if this is the Missouri Synod stance and I just fucked up in the past by not knowing it, or if this is his own thing.

But then I read his biography. He’s not just a pastor. He’s a pastor’s son.

And then everything clicked into place. I just wanted to shout, “I see you, Rev. Fiene!”

I’m not trying to excuse him. That’s not it. But I went from being “Oh, fuck you, you weirdo dink” to “Oh no! You poor dumbass.”

There’s a way in which you can see the patriarchy working like a trap for women, like these people run around just trying to lure women into it–just be pretty, be nice, don’t challenge, etc. and you can get a man and, when you get a man, you win–and at this point, thanks to feminism, you all know how that screws women over.

But this seems to me to be a clear cut case of a man with a bear trap on his own leg trying to convince others that the natural state for men is to walk around hobbled by bear traps. There’s nothing wrong with him! No! Being emotionally crippled is what makes him manly. Look how funny and charming he is while he spouts his weird, sad ideas!

Because, damn, when I read that he was a minister’s kid and is now a minister–and that kind of minister, where he has to judge his congregation’s worthiness to be in communion with its God–I wondered if he ever had a friend, a real friend, in his whole life.

I kind of doubt it. And I think I see him trying to believe that’s just the natural state of things and not something that was done to him, even as he tries to do it to others while insisting it’s just the TRUTH of things. That’s what I see.

I told you all how much it shook me to learn that my dad had let me spend a lot of time with a man he knew did bad things to women, without telling me.

I left out the part that this is the second time this has happened, that I know of. One of my dad’s best friends was accused of some kind of inappropriate sexual conduct by his niece. I think, though he doesn’t want to, my dad believes her, because he’s apparently always thought this friend was squirrelly with kids. And my dad sometimes seems to carry a tremendous amount of worry/guilt that this friend may have done likewise to us. As far as I know, he never did. But my dad claims to have always had these worries AND he let us hang out alone with this friend.

And, like, I suspect there’s a lot going on here that I don’t know about. And Christ, I do not want to know about it, like I wish I didn’t know about my grandfather trying to force my dad to shoot him. Like, these are profoundly damaged people whose rage and grief is a monster loose to damage others. My dad believes he is all in, that he would do anything for his kids (and, hell, he has tried in many cases), but there’s a way in which he gets to a certain point–a point where you really need him because he has knowledge you don’t–and he just can’t do it.

I have been wondering a lot about this. And I think it’s just a perfect storm of his own shortcomings and his theology.

How can a person be redeemed if he is not allowed to prove that he is not longer the man he was? And how can he prove that he’s no longer the man he was, if he’s not allowed to show that, under the same circumstances where he used to be bad, he no longer is?

The reason I think this is a deep theological problem, as well as just my dad’s own bullshit, is that I see other ministers doing it. And I don’t see a way around it, if you’re a Christian. If you believe in the transformative power of Christ and especially if you’re Christian clergy, how do you not give God the opportunity to work on people, even very bad people?

But it means choosing to put others in harm’s way for the sake of the redemption story of the person who would harm them, believing that God is going to keep those potential victims safe.

I can’t bear it anymore, being put in harm’s way for the redemption narrative of bad men, being a hurdle or a temptation in the way of their being good men. Without my consent. Without even my knowledge.

Every once in a while I think of how easy it would be to slip back into Christianity. I live in a really Christian culture. My dad is a minister. I like the familiar rhythms of the liturgical calendar. There’s enough satisfying mystery, enough mysticism. I don’t think I could ever be a monotheist again, but I could fake it well enough.

And then there’s shit like this and I just can’t even consider it. I mean, I, too, hope people can change. But I wouldn’t offer up any kid I know to find out. And I resent, so deeply, having been offered up.

The argument I always hear, too, is that this isn’t God, this isn’t really what Christianity is about, but, you know, that shit starts to sound like people defending an abuser after a while. Oh, okay, God didn’t really mean it. He’s a nice Guy, if you get to know him. Sure, some of his friends are dicks, but He’s not like them, even though He hangs with them all the time.

I can’t do it. Maybe it’s a personal failing. Maybe it means Hell forever for me. But I can’t pretend I don’t see how this works. Redemption comes at the expense of people like me, and the choice to use us in this way is often kept from us. Christianity is supposed to be in opposition to human sacrifice, but I don’t have a good way of understanding what happened to me other than that I have been put in the labyrinth with the minotaur and not even told there was a monster in the maze and I just don’t see much of a difference between what the Church did to me and what happened to the Athenian girls.

I mean, I’m not dead yet, but then, I’m also clearly not out of the maze.

The podcast “See Something Say Something” which is a Muslim guy and his friends sitting around talking about what it’s like to be Muslim had an episode on Jinns. Everything about it was super fascinating. I was especially fascinated to learn that jinns have the same religions we do (or at least, I guess, some of them do) and that the troubles with jinn/human romances often have as much to do with the jinn being, say, Christian as they do with the jinn being, well, a being of smokeless fire. I guess you can overcome one difference or another, but both?

Anyway, I was really struck in listening to it how much the jinn sound like old-school fairies or land-spirits. Not exactly, of course, and fairies and land-spirits aren’t always exactly the same things either, but as a basic concept, there seems to be a wide-spread belief that we share the world with something very similar to us that is not us.

So, Monster Talk had a cross-over episode with some archaeology podcast and they were talking about fairies in general and this wide-spread belief that there are Other People living nearby. They traced it back to just-so stories about ancient graves and artifacts. Like, what we now know are neolithic burial mounds were understood as fairy mounds and stone-age tools were seen as fairy tools and basically, when people were like “Shoot, did you make this? I know I didn’t make this.” rather than seeing that someone who lived there long, long, long before them did, they chalked it up to fairies or some other sort of Other People.

To which I say, okay, fair enough.

That does explain the physical evidence.

But I kept waiting for the explanation of the similarity of eye-witness accounts. Why do accounts of these Other People being shape shifters or looking like seven-foot-tall three-dimensional shadows, or just like us, but very small, or living in villages near us or with us but invisible to us transcend so many different cultures? Even if we have different names for them and different explanations for them, the accounts of what we see are very similar.

And it seems to me that this means we’re all seeing something. I’d like to hear some ideas about what. I’m even very fine with them being mundane, boring ideas. Like we already know humans are primed to see faces in things and hear voices in random noises. So, could there be a really straight-forward biological explanation for the Other People? Like some known physical or psychological response that we’re interpreting as being outside us?

I mean, as much as I like to believe in spooky stuff, the similarity of beliefs about the actions of these Other People does make me think it has to be something in us.

I mean, think of it this way–historically, there have been a million ways to form households. People from one culture come across people from another culture with vastly different household set-ups and they don’t know how to understand what they’re seeing.

But they come across people eating, even if they don’t know the rituals or taboos at play, they can still say, “Those people eat.”

Some of our very basic biological functions are recognizable across all cultures. If you find something shared across most cultures, it’s usually because there’s some enormous biological component to it. Something we all have to deal with. We have rituals for dealing with death because everyone dies. Even if you’ve only ever fucked in the missionary position with your eyes mostly closed, the Kama Sutra might blow your mind, but it’s not going to be unrecognizable to you.

Maybe I’m not getting at this with the exact clarity I want, but it seems obvious to me that if you have similar descriptions of something across very different cultures either they all have to be seeing the same thing outside them or they have to be having some kind of ubiquitous physiological or psychological experience that they’re interpreting as happening outside them.

Since we mostly agree that there aren’t really any such thing as fairies, what is happening here?

Like, for instance, here’s something I wondered. We know that our eyes don’t see everything we think we see–that each eye has a blind spot and that our brain and our other eye compensate for it. But what shape is that blind spot? Is it a narrow, tall oval? Could there be times when our brain just doesn’t bother to make up what’s in the blind spot and instead just interprets the lack of input as a tall, humanoid shadow out in the world instead of a small spot of nothing inside our eye?

I’ve spent all week trying to track down what in the house stinks so bad. It just jumped up on the couch with me. Mr. “I roll in dead things!”

I was pondering my decision a few years ago to switch to wearing sneakers to the Southern Festival of Books and I realized after the Best of Nashville party last night, it’s because I have no dress shoes I can stand in for any length of time and not want to die.

This morning’s walk was, then, glorious. Put on normal shoes. Walk and feel everything that had been clenched slowly unclenching. Watch the dog find the very last remnants of the dead armadillo. Scream as he attempts to make one last roll in the carcass.

I think one of the reasons that death is so upsetting is that we do have, observably and obviously, some animating force, something that separates “alive” from “not alive.” But when you’re forced to look at dead things, the thing you realize is that the line isn’t all that clear. Certainly at this point, the armadillo is as dead as dead.

But what is that animating force? Is it just an illusion of firing nerves that dissipates when those nerves no longer fire? If so, is that why we can luck out and sometimes restart life when it seems to have ended? Is this why people’s personalities can change so much due to stress or accident or medical incident, because, ultimately, there is no core person there, just this hallucination of consciousness?

But if we are just a storm of electrical impulses, why? Certainly, a lot of this stuff would be easier if hearts never broke, if you never felt compelled to give a shit. The person who doesn’t suffer must have an evolutionary advantage over those of us who cry a lot. And yet, the criers have won, have persisted the most. Judging by our numbers, there must be some advantage to being aware, even if being aware is being sad. At least some of the time.

The thing is that it’s not really that clear, just based on observation, when life ends. Not that I’ve seen it intimately that often, but, with Sadie, the moment after she died was a lot clearer than the moment she died. Death, it seems, is something you can’t say for sure has happened until it’s already a little bit in the past. It must, then, be a thin line, one you don’t see so much as you see its wake. So to speak.

One minute, no, second, things are working–even if incredibly poorly–and then they are not. One minute your body is fighting off rot and the next it’s not.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I just look at that armadillo every morning and it blows my mind to have watched it go from something that looked no different than a live armadillo to now a claw and the curve of its armor. And on the one hand “how” is a simple question. Crows and buzzards. But on the other hand, I have no good answer. Nothing satisfying anyway.

I’ve been listening to a lot of The Last Podcast on the Left while I work on this afghan. Two of the hosts are chaos magicians. The third host makes a lot of fun of them about it. So, you know it tickles me.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days about why magic and Buddhism (and weirdo cults like Scientology) catch on so well in artistic communities. And, because I’ve been thinking about it over the past few days, I’ve come to believe that the answer is that these professions are full of a lot of capriciousness and luck.

It’s very hard to believe that God has a plan when you see a lot of interesting, good shit not get the attention it deserves, or people who work really hard and nothing happens for them, or when you see cheaters or jackasses prosper. Like, fuck, if this is the plan, what kind of jerk is coming up with the plan?!

But, if you see that there is no plan, that everyone works really hard and things happen for a lot of people just based on luck, you can see why Buddhism, or the American take on it, becomes really popular–let go of expectations, make peace with not being able to control things, etc.

But you can also see how worldviews that promise you some level of control or ability to manipulate the chaos would also be super enticing.

The Butcher and I have been watching AMC’s Preacher and really enjoying it. But man, the actual business of being a preacher on that show is so weird. Like, I can accept a vampire, but accepting that a place that does full immersion baptisms has communion wine? I can’t do it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and the other day Coble had a Facebook post about how there’s basically no market for Christian fantasy & science fiction and why that is. The gist of it is basically that Christian authors want to write grown-up fiction with Christian themes, but readers of Christian fiction don’t want to read a lot of gore or sex or the kinds of things that mark a book as grown-up.

And it strikes me that Preacher suffers from the inverse of this problem. The show would be tremendously better if it had behind the scenes someone who treated Christianity like something other than another kind of fantasy trope. If it had a sincere, knowledgeable Christian overseeing the depiction of Christians.

Which is not to say that I think Christians are in any way being disrespected by the show. I mean, that’s one of the nice things about it. It does take people’s faith and their doubts seriously. But it doesn’t seem to understand the kinds of fundamental church things that would make churched people recognize themselves in that story.

I guess it’s tough. I wouldn’t like Preacher–which, let me reiterate, I like a great deal–if it were trying to sell me on returning to the fold. So, maybe it wouldn’t be that interesting for a Christian creator to work on it if he or she couldn’t proselytize through it.

But if Hollywood struggles to reach a Christian audience with the products centered around Christianity, one of the main reasons has to be that the Hollywood projects that treat Christianity as something other than just another flavor of fantasy–oh, cool, you have fairies and trolls, I have angels and demons–are pretty rare.

Which is a shame because I think Preacher could only benefit from getting those details right.

One explanation for how Indo-European gods spread across Europe was that they left female deities in place. You can argue that the Deyous-Pater/Jupiter/Zeus/Tyr/etc. god is pretty much, at core, the same dude. But Hera is not Frigg. The theory is that there were these local land spirits–goddesses, if you will–and the “foreign” god and His followers come into the area and set up worship of the new god by insisting that he married the most prominent of the land spirits. So, you’re not really changing religions so much as modifying.

That idea: that you change a people’s religion by marrying the land and its goddess off to the new god.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the reason there’s a devil in Christianity. When humans are so willing and so capable of evil, and with Christianity’s good explanation for evil–we have evil because humans are sinful by nature and it’s only through their relationship with Christ that they can be changed and steered from that nature–why does evil also need an outside explanation? Especially one that is so often depicted as a direct threat to God?

I posit that the devil is often doing the old things we expect from new religions. He’s exciting and seductive, he’s supposedly not that much different than what you’re doing now.

This is, I think, why the Devil rules Hell. There were a lot of underworlds in Europe that the Devil could have ruled (and, in truth that the poets sometimes give him), but the one to stick was the underworld with a local female spirit.

I had a weird, but really interesting morning yesterday. I spent it with a guy who told me about how he’d changed his life after a DMT trip.

Apparently, taking this trip made him realize that he hated himself and that a lot of the destructive or unproductive things he was doing with himself were because of this self-hatred and he realized that this self-hatred was stupid because we are just a small part of a large and mysterious universe. A tiny speck.

So, he got his shit together. He went to counseling. He started a vigorous and interesting religious study that’s now very meaningful to him. He’s made peace with himself.

It’s not the kind of conversation you think you’re going to have with a stranger on an ordinary day, but I feel really honored to have had it.

I told him how I always experience Two Boots as a weird, mystical place. Not in a grand “woo woo” way, but just in a mundane, but nicely strange way–people dancing or singing along to the music, interesting conversations being held, that kind of thing. So, we went there for lunch and a woman at another table was eating her pizza and wearing a huge gold crown.

Talking about religion is tedious and boring. Religious experience is like a vivid dream. To you, if you have it, it can shake you to the core. Hearing about someone else’s religious experiences? As dull as hearing about someone’s dreams.

Also, maybe this isn’t that weird. Maybe I did know about this before and just don’t remember that I knew.

All that being said, I’m going to say something about religion.

Every October, I take nine evenings and set aside some time to hang out with my ancestors and see what kinds of visions my subconscious might dredge up.

This October, I had a vision that I was in a room with a loom, but the loom was set up very strangely. It hanged down and, as the weaver worked it, she moved the done cloth up at the top. She unrolled more thread to work on somehow from these big stone or clay weights that hanged down beneath the work.

I couldn’t make sense of it, exactly, how the weights worked, how the loom itself could possibly make sense. I drew a picture of it and it still made no sense to me, so I put it out of my mind, figured it was symbolic, allegorical.

Until today.

Those are the weights, set up exactly how I saw. That’s the loom, but it makes sense, because it’s not relying on someone who doesn’t understand what she’s seeing to make sense of it.

This is a style of weaving I don’t think I knew existed before October. I don’t remember knowing it anyway. If I did know it, how did I not know it in a way that made more sense to me?

Last night, the little old ladies in my audience told me two ghost stories. One was about a woman whose son died in World War I–Bobby. He had gone to Vanderbilt, before dying in the war, and she became convinced that he was possessing or being reincarnated into a squirrel on Vanderbilt’s campus. So, she would come to campus all dressed in black and call out “Bobby, Bobby!” until a squirrel came up to her and she would know that was her son. She would then feed him and hang out with him. And then she died, but, of course, this didn’t stop her behavior. A couple of the women swore they’d seen her in the 40s and 50s on campus.

I love this story both because of the possessed squirrels, which, I’m sorry, is just awesome and because the hauntings double up. She is haunted and then she haunts.

The second thing they told me about was the Bell Witch. But not any part of the story I’d ever heard before. Apparently the Bell Witch used to haunt the streetcar lines. The drivers would all the time see a dark haired woman riding to the end of the line, but when they stopped at the end of the line, she’d vanish.

I have many feelings about the Bell Witch and the story of what happened in Adams has been debunked to my satisfaction. (In short, I think it’s clear that the first book about it was a piece of fiction kind of in line with what I do–taking real historical figures and making them legendary. Some clues to this effect are that Andrew Jackson never mentions traveling to the area or confronting the witch and, most importantly, that the whole way the witch works is far more Victorian than early Republic. In other words, the witch haunted like fictional Victorian ghosts haunt, not how people really understood the same phenomena before the Spiritualist movement. But that fiction was taken for fact and here we are.) But I’m growing more and more sure that debunking the story of the Bell Witch really misses what’s going on here.

Because, after all, why would the Bell Witch, a supernatural entity from Adams, a good hour north of Nashville, haunt the Nashville streetcars? Why would she appear in the mirrors of anyone who said “Bell Witch” three times in a dark mirror? Folks from Middle Tennessee don’t have “Bloody Mary,” they have “The Bell Witch.”

I think the hint is in the rise of the importance of the Bell Witch Cave. Pretty much any time you have people of European descent talking about a woman who lives hidden under the earth, they’re telling you, without knowing it, why the story has staying power.

The Bell Witch, I think, is, at least functionally, an American hidden folk. There are lots of hidden folks in European folklore. They’re not all the same. An elf is not a huldr is not a troll is not… and so on. But the very general idea that there’s someone to whom this land is important, who lives on it with you, and who’s responsible for the success or failure of your time on that land, who might steal your children, and who lives under or in the ground is wide-spread and old in European folklore.

There are theories, too, that most of the sky gods in European pantheons are actually the same god whose name got mangled as languages changed–Zeus is Ious Pietor is Jupiter is Tor is Tyr, etc. But their wives are not at all alike. Even in pantheons that we think of as being really closely linked, like the Greek and the Roman, Hera and Juno are different in really, really important ways. And Frigg is not much like either of them. The theory is that, much like the Catholic church came into an area and said, “Oh, those gods you’re worshiping? Those aren’t gods. They were just very holy people. They’re saints! Keep on worshiping them, just put your money in our collection plates now!” that the Indo-European sky god’s followers ingratiated him with local tribes by figuring out which local land spirit was beloved enough to function like a goddess-consort and then, in those communities, the sky god became her husband. A wandering Jovial (ha ha ha) dude with a local gal in each place he traveled for business.

In other words, the notion of a supernatural woman-ish land spirit who has a sacred cave and a set boundary of land she cares for and bad stuff she can get up to if you cross her is ancient. And since it can be talked about as if it’s a metaphor and not in conflict with Christianity, it’s the kind of folk belief that lingers.

I think that’s what the Bell Witch is doing for Middle Tennessee. True or not is almost beside the point. She is now the spirit of the place. The female energy we sense in the landscape.

As an aside, I’ll just say that I only have seven more blocks to go! I’m really excited about piecing this together and seeing how it turns out. And seeing if I have enough yarn to put it together…

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Josh Duggar. Well, no, I’ve been mostly thinking about his wife and wondering if she’s going to be able to overcome her upbringing and do the things that will protect her children from a guy who has touched children before and who lies about his current immoral activities.

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s weird to still be concerned about morality. What I even mean by morality. But I think I mean something like morality being the things we agree to hold each other to that are not harmful to us but help guide us to be kinder and more generous than we might otherwise be. I know I’m using “morality” to mean something very different than what the Duggars do.

But I’m mostly fascinated because it’s interesting to me to see these folks living by a set of rules they would impose, and in fact are working to impose, on the rest of us, under the guise of it being for our own good. And it seems to me that there’s a pretty clear promise, a very attractive promise, that, if you follow these rules, your life will turn out okay. That’s what people are buying into, the idea that there’s some right way to live and, if you can suss out what it is and do it, everything will be okay.

At a point like this, do they just try harder to live the right way? Is there some moment where they might realize that they’ve been doing something wrong? And/or could they realize that the whole premise is a lie? There is no secret path that, if you can discover it and follow it, will guarantee that your life will work for you.

There is only striving and questioning and failing and trying again. That’s why other people try to teach their kids to be curious, critical thinkers, even if it means they’re occasionally bratty monsters. This is why feminism, even if women are often bratty monsters. Because people have to make their own ways in the world and it’s easier if they have some sense of themselves as being capable of it.

The kind of lifestyle the Duggars promote gives an illusion of safety and certainty. But look at Josh’s wife. If she follows the tenets of her religion, her family is not safe and its future is uncertain, because Josh is a terrible leader. And she could sit around hoping that, somehow he figures it all out and becomes a good leader and deserving of the loyalty she believes a wife should show the head of her household, but every day she spends waiting for that to happen is a day her children are at risk.

I don’t think she’ll do the right thing, because the right thing in these circumstances is considered wrong and sinful by her religion and her family (and his), so even seeing it as the right thing or an actual possible thing, would be very difficult for her. But I hope.

One thing I keep seeing is this idea that the people in the church should just be armed. Like some NRA dolt blamed the pastor for not having a gun.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad’s friends, the black pastors, and how many of them, now that I look back on it, seemed fully aware that they could die in the practice of their ministry. I don’t think I ever worried about this with my dad. I worried the stress of the job might kill him. I hated what the people in his congregations did to him, often behind his back, but in front of me. But I never thought he was in physical danger. And so, even when terrible things were happening to my dad’s friends, I didn’t take seriously my dad’s fear for them. I didn’t understand then, as a child, that this is a place where people do kill ministers. I thought they were just jumpy because of MLK.

I say this because I want you to get how stone-cold and deeply ignorant I was, even as my dad was trying to wrestle with a truth he never hid from us.

Now, though, I see. I think. At least better than I did.

Here is the thing about arming people in church, as I see it. My dad’s friends were almost always in danger from people in their congregations, sometimes more broadly their communities, but usually it was someone in a predominately white church who resented having a black pastor. Should a pastor arm himself against his own people? Or are we just saying that white people and black people can never be each other’s people? That the only way for black people to be safe is to just always assume white people are the enemy?

How can you be a Christian, let alone a Christian minister, believing that your first duty to your flock is to protect yourself from them? How can you square turning the other cheek with carrying a gun with the intent of using it on any congregant that wishes you harm?

You can’t.

I don’t think you can pray and study with someone for an hour in genuine fellowship and keep one hand on your gun in case things go south. They’re just incompatible. Either you close yourself off to almost everyone in your church and only have genuine fellowship with those few people you intimately trust or you leave yourself open to being vulnerable to those who would harm you.

Christian churches can’t be open and be safe.

But a lot of this advice, to go back to my first point, also, assumes that the threat is always external. That someone from outside wants to do harm to people inside. My dad’s friends didn’t have that experience. The threat was from inside the church. And, if the Church is doing what it says it wants to do–spreading the word of God–then Christians have to be open to fellowship with strangers, who then are brought into the group.

What people are calling for is for Christians to be something other than Christian in order to be safe.

I have my issues with my dad, but I respect that he believes with his whole heart that people can be redeemed and changed by Christ’s love. (I have my grave doubts, myself.) I also respect that he knows that some people aren’t going to be. You sit across from 10 white supremacists and maybe only one changes his ways. I know my dad knows the other nine are still a danger.

I think he still believes it is his obligation to make himself vulnerable to scary people in order to reach them.

Again, he has his drawbacks, but, at least when it comes to racial justice, my dad wants everyone in church to be “us.” That’s what he’s worked for his whole life. That’s what his friends have put their lives on the line for, over and over.

A racist walking into a church and killing nine people can’t ruin American Christianity. American Christians deciding it’s safer to take precautions against “them” rather than trying to be open to folks becoming a part of “us” will.

I can’t begin to tell you how it feels to look at that list of victims and see how many have “Rev.” before their names. I can’t tell you how sad and scared it makes me for my dad’s friends, who somehow have to get up in the pulpit on Sunday, have to open their Bible studies to whoever says he needs it on Wednesdays, knowing that racists have no respect for the sanctity of the church and, in fact, that they’ll target ministers.

My dad’s cousin’s kid is making an elaborate necklace of Thor’s hammers. I say “kid,” but he’s my age. We sit with him at family functions and behave in rambunctious ways while egging each other on. And we’re Facebook friends, but I don’t know him any better than that.

I do know there are a limited number of reasons a man would have a collection of heathen pendents. And we can rule out “white supremacist.”

I think that the Old English love of riddles captures something of the way they approached life: life is a puzzle, but one to be encountered with joy and wit rather than despair. A lot of art is mimetic, but the relationship between riddles and reality is ironic, playful, tricky. Something similar can be said of the two modes of art, ‘realism’ (mimetic) and Fantasy (ironic).

The Anglo-Saxon world from which Tolkien took so much inspiration saw the universe as a riddle, and prized an ironic stance with respect to it. Not that courage and loyalty and strength were unimportant (of course, they were vitally important), but that a warrior hold his strength lightly, that he face death with a smile, that he fight more fiercely in the teeth of certain defeat. I am not talking about flippancy, or a more clumsy disrespectful. I am talking about accepting that there is a mismatch between our human abilities to understand and the brute fact of the cosmos.–Adam Roberts, via i09

I started last night. Last year’s was not usual, not… not good, but not what I had hoped for. It turns out that you can’t sit that close to Death for real and then come hang out by the gate again for comfort or wisdom or whatever. They shoo you off, encourage you to remember but not linger.

But, I’ll be honest. A ritual like that can leave you feeling like maybe the magic is over–whatever it was doing for you at one point in your life, now that you’re at another, it can’t do it for you anymore. And the truth is that I do imagine that there will come a day when I might stop, when I might give up on it. I feel that impulse in myself every year, to believe that it’s stupid or means I’m crazy or at least foolish. Even though I think it does important things for me.

This is one of the important things it does–it shows me things about myself that I otherwise cannot see. How I will let go rather than feel foolish, even if the thing I’m letting go of brings me great pleasure. My investment in believing myself to be so fucking smart isn’t always good for me. I am trying to learn to be gracefully foolish. Or even gracelessly. I’m trying to be willing to be shown to know nothing.

And I’m trying to learn to be open. I feel like I spent the first twenty years of my life never being able to say no to things. I spent the next twenty years learning to say no and to not feel bad about it. I’d like to spend the next twenty years learning some balance between the two–to be open to things and people while also not feeling like my own will has no meaning.

I’ve been thinking about that Aquinas nun running all over telling kids that masturbation makes you gay. It’s more than that. Apparently distant, unloving fathers and being molested also make you gay. Being gay might doom you to having hundreds of sexual partners. And on and on. Aquinas is defending her. She’s apparently out there showing God’s love.

Because, these days, they don’t hate you because you’re gay. They feel so very sorry for you because you’re gay because it means something bad has happened to you and you don’t have the necessary coping skills to do anything other than sin in response.

I spent much of the evening rolling my eyes. That an organization that sat back for decades while priests raped children is now going to turn around and lecture kids about proper sexuality? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha.

But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Let me back up and say that the Butcher watches a hell of a lot of The Young Turks and I often play video games while they’re nattering on. So, I half listened and then became transfixed by the end of this piece:

I’ve read my fair share of the Los Angeles files–the ones that are available pertaining to Tennessee–and I can attest that what Jimmy Dore is talking about here is pretty typical. Folks often know something is the fuck wrong. They act all surprised and outraged later, but they know something is wrong all the while and they blame the victims for forcing them to feel uncomfortable feelings. Dore’s biting observation that the priest just disappears and that everyone is encouraged to pray for him, like his is the most difficult journey being taken in the congregation is pretty much how it works. The suffering of the children is rarely reckoned with. And the safety of children wherever the priest might next land is just not considered.

And child-molesting and homosexuality are, of course, conflated in ways that totally are awesome for the hidden child molester–after all if child-molesting is the provenance of gay men and gay men are easily distinguishable from straight men through all these stereotypes we have about their behavior and looks, then you have no reason to worry about any priest that doesn’t hit those gay stereotypes.

But what we’re seeing is that, here, even the rear-guard can’t make the “gay people molest children” argument anymore. Now gay people are the victims of child molesters. So, now, finally, in a twisted way, the consideration for suffering is now extended to victims of child molestation. And gay people. Who are the same or something.

But I also want to point out that this is more of that “I can bring apocalypse” thinking. And let me be clear, I am not saying that people who feel like being molested ruined them in some way are wrong for thinking so. What I firmly stand for is your right to understand your own experience in your own terms. And I stand in hope of you not believing that is the only truth of your life. But the perpetrators of evil and the bystanders don’t get to rest assured (either in satisfaction or in guilt) that they have witnessed someone’s total ruination. They don’t get to point and say “Oh, you’re gay. That means someone broke you.”

To me, it’s just the flip side of what Jimmy Dore experienced–either victims are just treated like nothing happened or they’re now treated like something happened so devastating that they’re ruined for life. Either way, the starkness of those choices lets people off the hook. The problem is too small/too large for anything to be done about it.

They still get to use their homophobia as a shield to keep from seeing what’s going on in their midst.

One thing that confuses me, just a a fundamental level, are Biblical literalists. Like people who believe that the earth was literally created in six days. Which means that I’m conversely confused by people who think that an argument against Christianity is that the earth wasn’t made in six days. Maybe as someone who can’t ever remember not being able to read (I remember learning to write but I know I was reading long before then) and as someone who experiences the world as being almost indescribably strange and mystical, I just always thought those stories were metaphors–like a language that speaks to and has meaning to your soul first and then your brain scrambles to catch up.

I was reminded of that again yesterday at the doctor’s office, as I sat in front of a big machine and a woman peered deep into my eyeball, and took pictures of every inch of the back of it, and then made a giant map that would show the doctor this small portion of the landscape of my body.

Because I felt like a land there–a place that could be mapped. And I know that we think of goddesses being associated with the land and gods with being associated with the sky because of how a dude “plows the field” of his wife. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

But I swear, yesterday, I felt like I was realizing something different about what it means to be an embodiment of the land. Like some fundamental mystical truth was closer to being in a form I could articulate.

And, frankly, I’m not sure what that truth is. But the back of my eye tells you I grew up in Illinois. The shape I grew in is because of the land I grew on. Like, how much difference is there between me and dirt, in that case?

Everything about this story irritates me. Actual, ancient Vikings didn’t think the world was going to end this weekend. That’s a complete misrepresentation of, oh, everything. I can’t even imagine why an actual Viking would sit around predicting the end of the world. It just misunderstands everything about an Old Norse, pagan, worldview to think that this would even be a concern of theirs. The point was that even the gods die, but that things have a pattern. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but, in the Poetic Edda, the story of the end of the world is told in the past tense.

And, yes, there are many interesting reasons why this might be–the volva is merely saying what she saw in her vision and her vision is now over. Or that fate is set, so it’s completely knowable. Or, and my favorite, it’s an indication that time doesn’t work for the gods like it works for us. Balder is dead and has not yet died. Everyone knows how Balder will die and he is already dining with Hel. The gods fear Ragnarok and Ragnarok has already played out.

But old Norse folks had a very pragmatic view of death. Like, you might as well just do the shit that needs to be done because, if it’s your time to go, nothing you can do will forestall it and, if it’s not, nothing you can do will bring it on. But it’s also clear that no one thought you could know for sure how long a life you’d been granted. So, if you shouldn’t sit around worrying about when you’re going to die, why the fuck should you sit around worrying about when the world is going to end?

Also, apocalypse fantasies are for religions where there’s either pressure because of already occurring calamity–Why are we all dying from this strange rash? Oh, I predict the whole world is ending.–or because, fuck you, you’ll see I’m right when the world ends, you fuckers. Modern heathens aren’t under any more stress from already occurring calamity than the rest of our societies and Norse-ish paganisms aren’t exclusive. I can like Odin and believe that your love of Jesus is genuine and sincere. Just because Jesus isn’t the dude for me doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s real. And, I don’t give a shit if you think Odin is real. I’m not convinced Odin is real in the way people believe Jesus is real. And, of course, Odin wasn’t ever a person. And, even if you do think that Odin is as real as Jesus in the exact way Jesus is real, what polytheist is going to stand around going, “Well, these gods exist, but you’re delusional about those gods, so clean up your act, and worship like us, or you’ll be sorry!!!!” So, there’s no promise of final vindication in Ragnarok.

Not to mention that it’s hard for me to understand why/if the Norse would have thought that Ragnarok would have ended our actual world or if it was some kind of mystic metaphor. I mean, these are people who traveled extensively. They knew there wasn’t a serpent around the edges of this physical world. Yes, Midgard is our realm, but it’s also a mythic place. I’m not convinced that things that happen there have a 1 to 1 correlation with things that happen here.

But worse yet, this all appears to have started as a bit of a lark–as a way to advertise a cool event. And rather than take it as a kind of joking way to advertise a cool event, we’ve now got this nonsense, where news outlets are passing it off as an actual Viking belief.

I don’t have a big point to make about this other than “ha ha,” but I do have a small point to make. I think the mistake A&E and, in fact, the Robertsons have made here is to believe that there is but one type of conservative Christianity and it aligns with the one practiced by the Robertsons. See, the thing is that, as popular as the prosperity gospel is, it is, among folks who look demographically identical, also as unpopular. It’s a deep split in Christianity–can a rich person be a good Christian? Or, if you were a good Christian, would you have been giving so much away along the way that you would, in fact, not be able to be rich?

As a conservative Christian asked me, “Why should I listen to a rich guy’s opinion about what God thinks of homosexuals, since he’s not listening to Jesus about money?” And this is someone I think agrees with Phil Robertson about gay people.

So, it’s weird. It’s like the old “Preach, preach, now you’re just meddling” joke got short-circuited and people who should have been primed to shout “preach” at the first “gay people are wrong” remark all instead were like “who’s this hypocrite to speak for us?”

I mean, I think people like me turned away. But we weren’t that big a part of the demographic who watched the show. What should frighten people who think they’re marketing to conservative Christians is that that’s the market Duck Dynasty is losing. That indicates they don’t know that demographic as well as they think they do.

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